Context

The Semantic Web (Shadbolt, Hall et Berners-Lee, 2006) is an extension of the "classical" Web, in which data (and not only documents) can be published, shared, and link to other data. The semantics of these data is described by knowledge models (rules, ontologies) allowing to reason about the data, and to infer new knowledge.

Sophia is a (work in progress) implementation of the Semantic Web principles for the Rust programming language. This language emphasizes performance and reliability, making it a good candidate for developing, e.g., distributed services or embedded systems (smart objects). One of Sophia's goals is to open those applications to the Semantic Web. Besides, the ability to compile to Web Assembly makes it possible to develop efficient Web applications in Rust.

Hylar (Terdjimi, Médini et Mrissa, 2015) is an inference engine for the Semantic Web, developped in Javascript. One of Hylar's original features is that reasoning can happen on the client or the server side (for example when the client has limited resources, like a smart object). Another original feature is its ability to quickly revise inferences when its knowledge evolves.

For storing the data on which it reasons, Hylar relies on rdflib-js, a library also developped in Javascript.

Goal

The goal of this internship is to propose an altentative to rdflib-js, based on Sophia and compiled in Web Assembly. We will then evaluate the benefit of this change, especially in the context of Hylar.

Time permitting, we may also port into Sophia some of the reasoning mechanisms implemented in Hylar, to further improve its performances.

Applicant

This position is available to students in 1st or 2nd year of Master. Former knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, on the one hand, and the Rust language, on the other hand, would be a bonus, but is not strictly required.

Contact :

• Pierre-Antoine Champin (pierre dash antoine dot champin at liris dot cnrs dot fr)
• Frédérique Laforest (frederique dot laforest at liris dot cnrs dot fr)
• Lionel Médini (lionel dot medini at liris dot cnrs dot fr)

References

Shadbolt, N., Hall, W. and Berners-Lee, T. (2006) ‘The semantic web revisited’, Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 21(3), pp. 96–101. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262614/1/Semantic_Web_Revisted.pdf

Terdjimi, M., Médini, L. and Mrissa, M. (2015) ‘HyLAR: Hybrid Location-Agnostic Reasoning’, in ESWC Developers Workshop 2015. Portoroz, Slovenia, p. 1. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01154549v2/document